天下制覇

For you and meeeeeeeee!

Well, I got tired of waiting for a decent raw, so… whatever.

Impressions:

They actually made some pretty significant changes this episode to Asch’s entire presentation. He’s already quite a bit more sympathetic than he is in the game since they cut out the three or four times he blows off Natalia on their little trip through Belkend and the Ortion Cave and also added a long dream sequence showing his kidnapping. I really liked the first part of that, but the end of it, with Asch breaking into his home only to find his family and Natalia taking care of Luke just seemed really wrong and stupid. He just claimed to the random guards that he was the true Luke, and for god only knows what reason, they thought he was a fake despite being an identical clone, and then he just wussed out instead of stepping forward and saying "Yo, real dude here." I always just assumed in the game that Van or Mohs kept him under lock and key for a year or two during the transition, letting him stew and ferment and letting Replica Luke actually take over his life. They also cut out Jade’s speech on how replicas can magically either be weaker and crappier than the original, or the original can start falling apart because of the replica, but I’m sure they’ll shoehorn that in somewhere else later.

As for the rest, they cut out the Ancylopolyp battle (NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!) and actually cut Luke’s haircut scene short quite a bit, which is sort of a mixed blessing. It’s a really nice scene for Luke, but a really horrible scene for Tear and the start of some really horrendous Tear writing in general. 
Luke: "We have to save St Binah!"
Tear: "No, you’re not mature."
Yes, Tear is saying that she’d let another couple thousand people die in order to teach Luke a lesson about maturity. At least we’ve moved away from spoiled Luke and can really get into martyr Luke for a while. Please, die for our sins. PLEASE. We’ll just ignore how next episode should reveal that the whole Akzeriuth thing was a ginormous church plot and Yulia City wanted him to do it anyway. Oops! Spoilers!